#1GAM 05/15 Dev Diary – Part 2

We started making our second jam game, an entry for the One Game A Month 05/15 Theme “Childhood”. I decided to start writing a short dev diary to keep track on development progress. That is what you are reading now! Click “Continue reading” to read the dev diary entry for day two.

Models and Game still remain divided. I thought we me might see some 3D models in action, but rigging the main character takes longer than expected. That is not really suprising since Gege is still learning most of the rigging process. And it gave me time to focus on designing a UI concept that works with the input devices we wanted to focus on for this game. Because the tower defense genre is well-suited for touch devices we want to create the game for mobile devices in addition to the platforms we already had for our previous jam game Affectionate Armament (Win/OSX/Linux/WebGL/WebPlayer).

The basic layout for the in-game UI.

For combining touch and mouse I just decided to start with simple buttons as placeholders for icons later. The first concept is made up of a main menu and a sub-menu shown when active below the main menu. Both of these show 4 available actions aligned in the form of a cross. This is where controllers come in!

My favorite solution so far for compromsing between touch/mouse and controller input is showing the available interactive elements as they are mapped to the controller on-screen. To achieve this our menu will just be outlined by a graphic depicting the controller buttons mapped to the icons seen next to them. I have seen this mostly in UI heavier games like MMORPGs where you need to have the available actions visible to use them as a reference, but for a much simpler UI it can also be hidden after a timeout/on button press.

Rigging Timelapse

Apart from a some confusion about axes, buttons and the ability to switch button selections with an analog stick which took about one hour each building the UI prototype went easily and I could also fix some bugs in the gameplay on the side.

Next up: finishing the UI and hopefully putting some models into the game.